6.05.2010

Fernbank Natural History Museum

On Saturday John and I each ran around Piedmont Park, and I wish I had some pictures of that to show you. It's really beautiful and a wonderful place to run as a visitor to town. But I don't hold my camera when I go running, so no pictures.

We had lunch at Popi's, a Cuban/Caribbean restaurant off of Ponce de Leon.

John and I really liked the place. It's casual, perfect for lunch, and inexpensive. The service was awesome and the food was delicious. We picked it because it was on the way to the museum we went to next, and if you're near the Fernbank Museum, I'd recommend eating there.

We both ate the Jerk Chicken sandwich, which was sizable and on fresh, warm bread. I think the bread had melted butter brushed on it or something. It was so good.

I'm not wild about geckos so I was interested in this enough to go, but not that excited beforehand. Turns out, the exhibit was really great. Geckos, it turns out, are pretty developed little dudes.

We knew that they had detachable tails, but they also have a detachable layer of skin, which basically helps them escape big predators (they're built for a speedy getaway, not a fight).

The billions of tiny hairs on their feet help them stick to things in various ways - both in terms of friction and grip, and in terms of molecular attraction between their little hairs and various surfaces. Also they can see really well at night.

They had lots of types of geckos on display, naturally.

In general, my impressions of the Fernbank Museum are that it was nice enough, not crowded, had free parking, and was less than half the cost of the aquarium. Still, I think if I only had one day in Atlanta I'd rather shell out the money for the aquarium than go back to the Fernbank.*

Sometimes natural history museum displays kind of weird me out. They have a bunch of stuffed animals that always look sort of, well, old, and falling apart. The displays at Fernbank seemed to be kept up as much as possible, but you can only dust an old looking fox so many times.

Since the museum is still having trouble with people touching things they shouldn't in the exhibits, they display animals that visitors have (let's hope accidentally) broken. At first I didn't realize that they were there to scare us from touching anything, I thought they were just a bunch of even older, crappy looking stuffed animals. I'll leave you with this picture. Note the headless birds.

*It's not as if these are the two choices, but since I went to them back to back, I kept comparing our experiences.

Note: on Sunday, June 6th we are traveling to Chattanooga and then on to Cookeville and Memphis, TN, all in the span of a few days. After that we'll be in Springfield with my grandma (i.e., without the internet) so the blog posts will be spotty until we get back to Fort Wayne in a week. See you then!